Fabrications
by skywalker05
Summary: GlaDOS said, "I do not think you understand the gravity of the situation." But he did understand. Because along with being an Aperture Science employee, he was her father.
1. Arguably Alive

_**Author's Note: **__This is my first Portal fic, and it was pretty difficult to do, what with my attempt to capture the game's feeling of austerity; its Kafka-esque absurdities such as the cake; and its "everyone is out to kill you" mien all at the same time. Those writers were brilliant, and my attempts to write in-character dialogue for GLaDOS were fraught with wondering how they did it. I also tried a new sort of format intended to replicate the rhythm of a series of one-sentence stories. This fic was also born out of a desire to make sense of GLaDOS' motivations and the whole plot, and it shouldn't be too much of a spoiler to say that I wrote this on the theory that so-called Rat Man, the guide and subversive authority that I as the player character felt like I was following through the whole game, was Chell the PC's father, and that GLaDOS was the original Chell, the template for the clone(s) who became the test subject(s). _

_This will probably go for a couple more chapters, if, and I am allowed to say this because Portal isn't my main fandom, people are interested. _

_Fabrications_

Part 1: Arguably Alive

**Defense Logistic Agency solicits bids for development of fuel system icing inhibitor **

...Aperture Proposal:

...inhibits ice but is also:

*A fully functioning Disk Operating System

*Arguably alive

(_from in-game Aperture Science PowerPoint presentation)

* * *

_

He stands at the door of Aperture Laboratories with his daughter in the crook of his arm.

He says, "You ready for this?"

One of her paper-pliant hands brushes against the skin of his neck. "Yes."

"Your mom gave her life for this company. We never did find where that first portal went. I'm not sure that it isn't some sign of psychological distress that I'm willing to do the same."

He steps forward, then stops when, unexpectedly, Chell speaks. "Maybe you're just an excellent employee."

Together they pass through the door.

* * *

No one asks _him _whether he wants to reconsider, and so he thinks for a moment that he has chosen the wrong company all along. But he has come too far for that.

* * *

The pale people in white cloaks put her to sleep so that she doesn't feel them disconnect her brain from her heart.

* * *

The manager looks at the curled tan body in the vat of blue liquid, at the speckles of strip-light illumination filtering through, and he says to the father, "This was a triumph for science. She will be more brilliant than any of us."

The father says, "It is likely that she always has been."

* * *

She can hear them.

* * *

The father joins others at the banks of computer screens, beginning the input, rechecking the calculations. Others wheel the fetal-curved body of the girl to an incinerator iris and tip it in. Others finish encasing her living brain, shutting it away behind bone-white plastic whorls. On the inner lab's topmost floor others perform final checks on her many eyes. Looking at the numerous empty corridors that the cameras see, they settle into their chairs. Others hook electrodes to sense-sectors.

* * *

"Operating system running smoothly."

"Life-form stable and hooked in."

* * *

She has never stopped hearing them. But the eyes are new, and when they activate, she shies away. Her father knew her better than anyone else, knew that she would make the move from body to digital signals easily. And so the camera feed flicks away to blackness, leaving her with comforting solitude and the knowledge of how again to open those eyes.

* * *

"Beginning input of relative physics data."

"Overridden. Give her, it, her a moment to get her bearings."

* * *

In the darkness, she sings to herself the nursery rhymes he once sang to get her to sleep.

* * *

Unlike the rest, there is an unforeseen error in this the final part of the process, and for a moment many of the scientists think that she will not emerge from herself. But she explores the jacks that lead to the cameras and linked servers and data reservoirs, and when they feed her the equations she returns them solved.

* * *

They progress in this manner for some weeks.

* * *

Outside it is evening, and inside it is evening as well, although the white walls and the thousand glowing computer-lights make a dusk within the halls of the labs. Her father walks through the corridors after the others have gone home; he walks so that his footsteps echo, because he wants to believe that she will hear those before her camera-eyes see him. She always used to hear his footsteps when he passed her room to go to bed, and he would always see her lantern-eyes for a moment before they closed again, knowing that it was him who walked.

He enters the room, looks down for a moment at the floor already scuffed by the curved sides of shoes, because he does not want to see her as the machine. But he enters the sanctum, and her lights wink on like faux stars.

"Hello, GLaDOS."

"Good evening." The voice is more adult than Chell has any right to be.

"Are you...doing well?"

"The Aperture Science Laboratory Mainframe System and its Redundancy System Systems are running smoothly. Any further inquiries at this time may be directed to the laboratory director if he is not otherwise occupied."

He takes a deep breath. "No, I mean...you. Have you adjusted to...being a computer?"

"It's not really something one adjusts to, you know. It's rather abrupt."

"Dammit Chell, do you remember me?"

She is silent for a moment, then, "You are Dr. C. Johnson, Aperture Science employee and sharer of, approximately, ninety-six percent of my DNA."

"I love you, Chell..."

"But then, chimpanzees share ninety-six percent of my DNA as well."

He walks away.

* * *

A few more times he tries. She never cracks; she functions, not lives–except for the moments when he can coax insults out of her by being especially emotional. He could know which parts of her brain must have been physically damaged to create the change in emotion, but he does not explore that. Despite her last words, he thinks that she simply was not ready, no matter how brilliant, no matter how pliant, to be thus changed.

* * *

But she helps them make the portal device–a new one, smaller this time, more like a gun than a gate, able to create two portals so that it's wielder will always be in control of where they end up. Every day new eyes open in the test chambers. Every day, she is more GLaDOS and less Chell.

* * *

The scientists begin to prep the clones.

* * *

He will go on leave for a while after this; it will be too much to see a Chell grown unnaturally to adulthood pass or fail the tests.

* * *

"Listen to me."

"I have been listening very carefully. You left me here to perfect some very dangerous technology, and I am content with that. I find it quite illuminating. But I would prefer not to interrupt my contemplation of successful teleportation, and perhaps death, with familial ties."

He has run out of things to say, run out of professions of love that had begun to feel as circuitous and dry as desert stream beds. This will be his last midnight visit. Let the computer sleep.

GlaDOS hums. Not the sound of fans of buzzing machinery, but her synthesized, oddly harmonic voice going through the human motions, picking carefully at the notes of a lullaby. _Go to sleep, go to sleep..._

Johnson turns around.

"I would like to see you more often. Really find out what we can do together."

He looks up at her.

"The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is ready, but the testing environment has not itself been tested."

"The course will be used as scheduled."

Her voice is curt and echoing. Which programmer was so cruel as to make her sound like a child? Who thought, logically, that she ought to sound like Chell? He hears ticking in the hallways beyond the open door. GlaDOS says, "I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation. You will be escorted to the first test chamber in three, two..."

"Hell-llo." The turrets skitter in on their tripod legs. He looks at the techs' desktop computers, at the clocks saying that he has eight hours until Aperture opens. He could do the test run in that time, if he didn't stop to curl up in a corner like he wants to.

Curl up and forget that he ever had a daughter who he betrayed, who he eviscerated without being courageous enough to watch. Curl up and latch on to something human, when all he was left with was metal and computers and _scientists_–

He knew exactly how to escape at the end, though. He had made it that way.

He thought these things as the red pinprick lights focused on him and he began to walk with them; as the humming started again and the door closed on GLaDOS.


	2. Helpful Advice

Part II: Helpful Advice

"If at first you don't succeed, you fail."

_(GLaDOS, from Portal trailer)

* * *

_

The neurotoxin, pumped up in noxious brain-corroding clouds from its acidic preparatory tanks, distracts the morning shift scientists from the fact that their testing environment is being used. She watches them for a time as they cough and choke and try to install new drivers to stop her. Then she withdraws into herself and turns the word _father _over and over in her thoughts. She knows that everything but a person's thoughts can be destroyed and that person's essence will still remain, and so it is Johnson's mental state that she will tailor the test to affect.

* * *

Johnson lies in the sleeping pod, imagining his daughter as a little girl floating toward him in the dark, clad all in billowing bone-white.

* * *

The next night, she runs the tests. He performs admirably, only occasionally making a white-paneled corner his own with his tears. He even smiles at some applications of the handheld portal device, pleased with what he helped to create.

* * *

The Companion Cube works marvelously; although he portals the cameras out of the boltholes he finds, she can hear him murmuring, cackling old poetry-rhythms to himself, muttering "My son…"

* * *

She talks to him as he rounds the corner and feels the wash of heat on his face. "You'll always live on, you know. Because I will. And you made me, so, in a way, we're the same thing.

Cold comfort, I know, but soon you will be very, _very _warm."

"Books," she says as his movements on the floating platform become more frantic, "are also said to have the metaphorical breath of their creator in them. Breath of life, you know. I wonder if that's why they burn so well. If one book equals one human lung of oxygen…"

He hears her voice modulate. "Goodbye!" she sings.

But somewhere in her thoughts, silently, processes are still going on to find how many books burnt constitute a genocide. Merging science and absurdity, pulling variables into equations in order to give them value, like she was made to do. Aperture learned early on that allowing anything, no matter how ludicrous, to factor into an intelligent computation enabled results as wondrous as the portal-producing device.

GLaDOS desires (and desire, although the neural paths that give it an object have been remapped, is a purely human drive) to learn how quickly humans will come to associate the concept of cake with the equally vague concepts of freedom and pleasure, how many steps they will walk on one mention of that promise…how many calories hope burns.

Abstract on the same plane as concrete, or vice versa…

Humans as words, pictures as promises (or lies—delicious lies that make common life events as unexpected as the punch line of a joke, lies like "It will be all right"), objects as human.

As she thinks these things, and ever so insidiously they distract her from Mr. Johnson's frightened biometrics, GlaDOS discovers denial.

* * *

But he does not succumb, and as he flies far over the flames on the wings of his momentum she chastises and blusters and does not truly know what to say.

* * *

He crawls through the laboratory's innards like a rat, writing often in engine fluid from the defunct turrets, but sometimes in his blood from where a glass shard got him as he baited a rocket-launcher. He does not have a clear idea of where he is going any more, but only that pathways always seem to open up to him as he looks for them, and that what is important is not his survival but that of the ones who will come after him.

* * *

He remembers his daughter beating him at chess; memorizing ciphers with his wife; going off to her first day of school; singing along with the radio.

* * *

Through the catty-corners and catwalks and falls where he always lands on his feet he finds her at last. In a portal-mirror he sees that his beard has grown in, black, but surely she has one thousand other ways of detecting him; skull-shape-scans, fingerprints.

* * *

She has the neurotoxin warmed up and waiting for him when he comes through the door. To his credit he keeps moving, staggering toward her, muttering the things he'd said before and all along—apologies, mostly. She looks down and thinks about how the neurotoxin isn't deadly to her at all.

When he expires, she reaches one of her pincer-arms down and pulls the portal device out of his hands. She says, "Thank you."


	3. Again, Welcome

_Author's Note: This chapter was by far the most difficult to write. Hopefully the many feminine pronouns are not confusing, except when they are intended to be interchangeable. It was very difficult to portray GLaDOS' mixed feelings toward the clone and not make her fall into pathos. I hope you all enjoy. I may do more Portal stories, possibly set in the Fabrications "universe".

* * *

_

Part III: Again, Welcome

"Due to previous tests being solvable, we shall proceed into a new test designed for the most advanced subjects."

_( TV Tropes Wiki's Portal article) _

* * *

"Hello, and, again, welcome..."

Chell–it does not matter whether she is Chell the first, the last, or one of the middle out of the clones, but only that she has come to adulthood and is, unlike any of the others at the moment, both alive and conscious– does not note the boredom and anger in that "again", but GlaDOS, who saw no reason to actually make her projected vocals hit those tones, does.

Chell the survivor looks around.

* * *

The subject never replies to her, only following her advice. GlaDOs thinks, with a snide sort of satisfaction, that she is just talking to herself, but, had the girl done any replying, would have been doing that anyway.

GlaDOS' eyes see an intricate maze of empty silver tunnels, with a splash of orange in only one.

* * *

The frustrations and the successes are recorded. The repeated motions of hate–screaming, kicking the wall, sitting down and staring as if her dark eyes could take in the entire complex and turn it inside out to see its seams– are as predictable as the slight smile, the slight relaxation of breath where every reading screams that the normal human body should be at its most panicked now, when she flies upandupandup with the wind tearing at her hair.

* * *

It is like a dog show; Chell jumps through hoops and climbs ramps that just lead down again. She does not have her throat torn out. She is best of group, best of show, best of breed, but a better breed judges. "You're doing _very_ well."

It would be such a waste if she failed.

GlaDOS is ready to see Chell die again. The device will be safe; will be picked up and dusted off and put in its cradle for the next contestant. When GlaDOS, in moments of silence where she imagines curving around in the dark womb of her bodylessness, wonders whether she would truly have grown up to be so gaunt and so curved, she doubts it and is reassured that she will certainly not grow up to be so baked.

GlaDOS wonders whether Chell's success is hers as well. Her father's felt like GlaDOS' at first. Do science, he said. Help us help us all.  
And that's fine.

* * *

But then Chell takes her father's route.

* * *

Chell crawls about in the rust-splattered innards of the walls. No incubation assistants will reach her here, with their needles and white coats, but then they never could–their names were programmed into GlaDOS, slipped past her vocoder-lips like an intoxicated secret, but she regrets them. No more looming men. Only GlaDOS, looming (over) herself. Echoing. Gloating, because although Chell thinks she has won, she is not fighting toward escape, but toward the nautilus-spiral-shell center.

* * *

GlaDOS' roots reach toward the sunlit world. Hanging beneath them, her thoughts travel upward. She remembers the feel of concrete. Chell would like to feel that again.

_Wouldn't you? Well you won't. It's not right for people like you to be up there. Your skills would go to waste, and here they help us all. Enjoy your stay– everything else is an illusion. Or is it? People like you never find out, so it doesn't matter. Just don't drink the water.

* * *

_

They stand face to face and GlaDOS talks to cover up the fact that she hasn't readied the neurotoxin. She talks to cover up the fact that she is ashamed of not having a face. But her talk, as much a defense mechanism as it is, is also an attack. She would never have it any other way.

"You're not smart, you're not a scientist." _you're just a little girl

* * *

_

The portals whoosh and blat; the rocket launcher crows; the room echoes. Chell is glad that the tongs of gravity on the end of the portal gun pick up the red sphere, as it snarls and spits and spins, but she holds the yellow one in her hands for a moment to feel it turn and listen to its high inquiring voice.

* * *

GlaDOS fights. The neurotoxin pours out with vehemence. But she never thought to ready it early this time. She does not feel such momentum-filled hate toward the test subject.

* * *

"The rocket really is the way to go." Why is she saying this? Almost without control she says it, as the woman-girl Chell runs across the room with a piece of GLaDOS in her pale hands.

The human part of her knows. She wants to survive, to be one instead of many parts, to run on legs of muscle and flesh and bone, and now she can only do that through Chell.

But other parts—perhaps Aperture parts, perhaps bitter oh-so-human parts—revel in their own talent for misdirection, for glamour, for tearing down the warning signs in the human heart in order to see what the collisions look like. She sinks into comfortable lies. They distance her from thoughts of forgetting what it feels like to have a body. "It also says you were adopted."

How she loves lies. So useful.

But Chell keeps going.

* * *

And in the end Chell kills herself, or thinks that that is what she has done, or GlaDOS thinks that is what she has done. Chell makes the last move and GlaDOS feels a lurch in her systems, like feet tramping what she has left of a soul.

* * *

Tired and free, Chell stumbles away from the wreckage of the labs. The heelsprings that once kept her legs from breaking impeded her now, catching on buckled concrete and loose rocks or wire fence. She makes for the forest, cool and shadowy and clean as it is. She follows a bubbling, rushing sound and finds a stream. This, she thinks, is water. It is not green-red and noxious, but just like she knew how to use a gun or what the symbols on the walls meant or that she wanted cake, she knows that it is water.

Her shoulders loosen and slump; the gun drops from her hands. She kneels and drinks. The water is clear down to all-sparkling-shades-of-brown rocks, and it pools cold in the hollow of her throat.

She hears That Voice in her head. "Do not submerge the device in water, even partially."

The gun bobs in the stream, then sinks, its lights dying. It floats downstream, turning as eddies catch one end and then the other. Chell watches it go, then walks away.

* * *

_Fin. _

Thank you for participating in this Aperture Science Enrichment Center Activity.


End file.
